‘Remnin Park’ – a fictional love story about two people whose two worlds will forever keep them apart, a story of separation that might well have described the 25 year musical divisions within the Toronto band itself. Michael, Margo and chums were never your standard ranch stash; too much weary ethereal melancholy for that, two-parts dusty Americana to three-parts gothic with bucketloads of creepy psychedelia thrown in for good measure. It was band pulling in two directions: the familiar and the chillingly alien. And though quite possibly the band’s most direct and immediate release for ten years, there’s little sign of reconciliation – and we have a brief ‘otherworldly’ stay in China to thank for that.
Put together in the band’s home studio and built on loops of ‘field recordings’ made by songwriter Michael Timmins in China, ‘Remnin Park’ is a characteristically brooding collection of laments, ranging from solid West Coast road tunes like ‘My Fall’ and ‘Stranger Here’, mournful saloon tunes like, ‘Cannot Sit Sadly By Your Side’ and positively alienating freak-shows like ‘Sir Francis Bacon on the Net’. Slide blues guitar, a string quartet and the smoky, honey purr of sister Margo virtually ensures a sacred balance. Sharleen Spiteri it is not.
In the absence of Mark Linkous and Sparklehorse, ‘Remnin Park’ seems likely to satisfy even the most hopeless of Cowboy Junkies.